Lodin is on trial now in Berlin with Yusuf Ocak, who was arrested in Vienna shortly after Lodin. Both have pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges, CNN reported.

“The document delivers very clearly the notion that Al Qaeda knows it is being followed very closely,” Musharbash told CNN. “It specifically says that Western intelligence agencies have become very good at spoiling attacks, that they have to come up with new ways and better plotting.”

Meanwhile, a former U.S. government official said assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Gen. David Petraeus were on bin Laden’s “wish list.”

Michael Leiter also told NBC’s Today show the assassinations weren’t bin Laden’s highest priority: that would have been another attack on the massive scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

That supports disclosures from captured documents published on the weekend by the Washington Post, which painted bin Laden as a beleaguered, fretful CEO of a global terrorist organization slipping from his grasp.

Bin Laden had become obsessed with the ideological purity of his terrorist mission, the Post said: killing innocent Muslims was wrong, killing Westerners was permissible.

The nuances of that extended to bin Laden’s denunciation of the attempt by Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad to explode a car bomb in Times Square in New York, the Post said.

Shahzad had sworn an oath of loyalty to the United States as a new citizen and “it is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemy,” wrote bin Laden, according to a copy of the document quoted in a new book by analyst Seth Jones.

Other documents reveal an organization shaken and weakened but eager to regroup, the Post said.

A paper by bin Laden successor Ayman al-Zawahiri spelled out plans for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan once NATO troops leave, the Post said.

Bin Laden was also grooming new factions, such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram, to take up the ideological cause and terrorist attacks, the newspaper said.